Quite often when government and quasi-government boards and agencies work on programs for tax breaks and grants, it can look like so much gobbledegook to the average citizen.

In fact, that seemed to be the case a few years ago, when voters turned down a proposal to create an enterprise zone in Martinez that would have implemented a taxing scheme to help clean up that tired urban business area. Confusion about the proposal overwhelmed any support, and it failed.

One of the problems of government intervention in the free market is that it can artificially limit supply, skewing the balance of supply and demand.

If you want proof, just go to the ammunition aisle of, say, Academy Sports. Those empty shelves are courtesy of a belief that the feds are going to take away guns and limit ammunition. Just that fear has been enough to induce hoarding, like homeowners stocking up on milk and bread at the threat of bad weather.

We already had a pretty good idea here in Columbia County of the potential encapsulated in those 19 acres we call Evans Towne Center Park.

But if there was even the tiniest speck of doubt, it left town before the Masters guests arrived last week.

Between the ninth annual Rock Fore! Dough concert Tuesday of Masters week, Family Fun Day events on Wednesday, the Chris Young concert on Thursday and the Lynyrd Skynyrd show on Friday, an estimated total of some 17,000 people visited the park.

When Columbia County landed a $13.5 million federal “stimulus” grant to set up a fiber-optic broadband network throughout the county, we editorialized a few words of caution.

First, the whole idea of a conservative county signing up for “free” federal money is just hypocritical; we can’t complain about federal spending while sticking our noses in the trough. Second, such technological infrastructure should be built by the private sector – not by the government.

Even so, we have it now. Like the child of an unplanned pregnancy, it’s ours.

Columbia County’s elected officials and agency directors this week, like those in neighboring communities, are working hard to catch the attention of Masters visitors with the potential for returning to our community and bringing jobs with them.

There’s plenty in Columbia County to show off, as Convention and Visitors Bureau Director Randy DuTeau discusses in his guest column today, as newly hired Development Authority Director Robbie Bennett talks about in a story today, and as County Commission Chairman Ron Cross wrote about in a guest column Sunday.

It’s just about time for Columbia County to put behind us the recent saga of the Greenbrier High School soccer team drinking on a school trip.

But first, a few lessons that should not go unlearned:

• Kids will be kids. That’s why adults have to be adults.

Responsibility for violating team rules, the school system code of conduct and state law rests on the 16 players who admitted or were found guilty of violating those rules. That’s unquestionable. Every one of them knows drinking alcohol on a team trip is just flat-out wrong.

Columbia County’s population continues to rise, and along with it, student populations continue to increase. But school funding from the state still is far below the amount the state itself says it’s supposed to provide, and even though school taxes consume the biggest chunk of your property tax bite, the system is struggling to keep up with that growth.

That means next year, the school board plans to hire just 15 teachers – some of them in bookkeeping “fractions” – to meet the needs of educating at least 400 additional students.

We’ve all likely seen the Depression-era images of desperate train-hoppers riding America’s rails in search of jobs. The novelty of six recent arrests demonstrates that we’re obviously less accustomed to 20-somethings illegally trespassing on trains in search of aimless adventure.

Railroad companies are familiar with both, which is why they vigorously ferret out, arrest and prosecute train-hoppers – including the six who were caught March 16 by CSX Railroad police when the train on which they’d stowed away stopped briefly in Grovetown while en route from Atlanta to Savannah.

If character is what you have when no one is looking, we need to seriously examine our character.

We’ve already debated for weeks now the case of nearly $200,000 looted from an Evans neighborhood association, and the criminal case of a Martinez attorney who found a valuable ring and turned it in only after it became obvious the cops were looking for it.

And now we’re embroiled in the potentially season-destroying meltdown of the Greenbrier High School soccer team, with 18 players kicked off for using alcohol and drugs on a team trip.